Residences

Our Facilities

Chesterton House is the proud owner of a 2-acre campus that includes 2 large residential facilities plus a cottage for a staff couple. The men’s residential facility is a large English Tudor mansion with large common areas on the first floor, including a living room, sunroom, dining room, and industrial kitchen. The facility houses up to 20 men.

The women’s residential facility, located just next door, is a historic landmark of Ithaca once owned by the Treman family. This elegant residence features sweeping views of Cayuga Lake. You’ll find a grand dining room that seats up to 16, a living room with a beautiful baby grand piano, a sunroom, study, kitchen, and den, as well as a second-floor wrap around balcony overlooking Ithaca. Including an additional rental house on Thurston Ave, we have the capacity for 15 women, with hopes of expanding.

Spread between the two houses, the Chesterton House resource room features many of the best volumes of Christian scholarship and subscriptions to about 15 periodicals.

Intentional Christian Community

Chesterton House exists to help Cornell students make holistic connections between Christian faith and academic study. But even as we affirm your calling as students and encourage you to take your studies seriously, we also affirm that students are more than “brains on sticks.” Our bodies need to rest, to play, to cry, and to be regularly sustained with food. All of which is to say nothing of our deepest needs for community—meaningful relationships with classmates, neighbors, and the Maker of Heaven and Earth.

Living Lives Ordered by the Love of God

This living-learning community makes space for the faithful intersection of your “head” and your “hands.” What would it look like for a Cornell student to leave the room of detached individualism and step into a space where we might become more like Christ through embodied practices—praying for the world, cooking dinner for roommates, cleaning the bathroom, celebrating life, and even entering into shared lament?